Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170050
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM SAFIRE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Saddam Hussein.
His opponent, who is nobody, will get zero percent. Because the ballot is not secret, the dictator's campaign theme is sure to work wonders on the electorate. Political gurus everywhere imagine a bumper sticker that's a real on-message grabber: ``Vote for Saddam or die.''
We may laugh at his need for a new mandate, but the ``re-election'' is part of his plan to rebuild both internal and external power. He is uncontained, getting more dangerous every day.
The man the world put in charge of monitoring Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction reports that the Iraqi dictator is at it again.
Rolf Ekeus is a Swedish diplomat who could give the United Nations a good name. He listens; he and his investigating team follow up; and he reports what he is able to find, even when members of the Security Council want a wholly different story from him.
Early this year, I went to see Ekeus at U.N. headquarters in New York to check out information about germ-warfare facilities that Iraqi sources told me Saddam was hiding from international inspectors.
Ekeus did not bluster that press interest was unhelpful, as many bureaucrats do. He had most of the data about biological sites, and checked out the rest.
Caught red-handed, and with additional facts about to be spilled by a defecting thug, Saddam's toxicologists admitted to the U.N. commission what they had long denied - that germs had been produced in Iraq to be put in missile warheads to attack enemy cities.
Because Saddam had been lying about his secret germ production, nations eager to lift the sanctions on Iraq were frustrated in their desire to begin business as usual. France, China and Russia on the Security Council, as well as Germany and Ukraine, Bulgaria and North Korea, want Iraq pumping and selling oil again, providing the money to buy their nuclear and missile technology.
For a decade, these countries and a few others have been denigrating reports of Saddam's acquisition of mass-destruction armaments as alarmist. So did our CIA for too long; reports in this space, before the Gulf War, of impending Iraqi nuclear production were dismissed with ``not for five to 10 years''; now we know Saddam was just three months away from his Hiroshima-size device.
Experience has shown that alarmism is impossible when it comes to the Iraqi dictator. Last week, as R. Jeffrey Smith reported in The Washington Post, Ekeus revealed that Iraq - even today - has ``a very advanced procurement system'' for importing missile parts, high-tech furnaces and guidance systems.
Not only has Saddam been concealing his nuclear, chemical and biological capacity from U.N. eyes, he is now buying copyable components for a delivery system. His scientists and engineers are in place, and have not forgotten how to fill a warhead with the potential to kill a city.
It may be, before a critical point is reached, some nation that has taken hits from his Scud missiles before will have to take out facilities like Ibn al-Haytham, to another chorus of world tut-tutting.
Before then, however, can we not know the specific identities of Saddam's suppliers? I do my bit from time to time, but Ekeus, protective of sources and unwilling to upset specific U.N. members, refuses to name names.
Where is Der Spiegel's fingespitzengefuhl on the German firms helping Saddam? Can Le Monde, with its intelligence contacts, be afflicted with ennui at the dirty dealings of French companies? Is the newly free Russian press fearful of upsetting the mafiya's supply line to Baghdad? Is the vast press corps at U.N. headquarters incapable of digging out a few corrupt corporate names?
Public exposure of illicit blood-money contracts would dry up some of Saddam's best sources. No story is more important than the re-armament of a mass murderer. Not even the news of his glorious re-election.
- New York Times News Service
by CNB